Are Lothe Kolbeinsen — Christian Meaas Svendsen

Context
When: 24.08.2020
Where: Oslo, Norway
What: Martial arts, supernatural field recordings, working with institutions and more

C: Tea?

A: Yes, please!

C: Are you a tea connoisseur?

A: Not so much now anymore, but I had an interest in it when I was part of a tai chi group back in the days. The instructor was importing tea from China, I remember. I got to buy some tea off of him, and it was much cheaper and of better quality than what I could get in shops.

C: I have a good friend in Malaysia who has an acquaintance running a tea shop in Kuala Lumpur. My friend is of Chinese descent and is concerned with Chinese tea. He has definitely broadened my tea horizon and bestowed me with some good pu’er tea from time to time. Still he has a very relaxed approach: If you like it you like it. It doesn’t matter if it is cheap or expensive, or even prepared the wrong way.

A: I just wanted a good alternative to coffee, something I could drink throughout the day and still be able to sleep at night. When I’m practicing, I like to have something to sip off from, and I guess the best alternative would be water.

C: I easily get shaky if I drink coffee, probably because I don’t consume it that often. Tea, like you say, works throughout the day.

A: Whenever I get interested in something I always try to find the best products and equipment. I think I would be in trouble if I got too interested in tea. Suddenly I would be in a situation where I’m spending all my money on a couple of grams of the most exquisite stuff. Hobbies are nice, I just can’t have too many of them.

C: If we rewind back to your Tai chi period. That was something you were doing here in Oslo?

A: That’s right. Before I came to Oslo in 2004 I was practicing kung fu in Trondheim. The guy who ran the club was originally from Vietnam and was a soldier during the Vietnam War. He came to Norway as a boat refugee after having been locked up as a POW for a long time. He had been through a lot of things, and he was the only survivor on the boat he came with. The other ones died of starvation and thirst. They were floating around for 6 days.

C: How was the training with him?

A: It was quite rough, but in a fun way. He was the type who would kick you in the ass if you if you were lazy or sloppy, but always in a tongue in cheek matter. I never had the feeling he was misusing his authority as a teacher.

C: I had similar experiences practicing martial arts when I was younger. Looking back, I was lucky to be part of clubs who focused on tradition instead of the sports aspect. We also got pushed around from time to time. I wonder if that type of pushing around is acceptable in our present “time of consent”. Anyway — what happened when you moved to Oslo in 2004.

A: I couldn’t find a kung fu club which I liked, so I ended up practicing tai chi instead. I was doing that for a while, but I had to quit when we got our second child, and I’ve found a substitute in running – despite it being very different, of course. Martial arts was a way to keep myself physically in shape, put my mind on something else. Running achieves that.

C: Still, there’s something special about doing an activity together with other people, right? In the oriental martial arts everybody is doing the same thing simultaneously, expressing harmony.

A: If the group dynamic is good, it’s a great thing. The tai chi group I practiced with had its problems. I remember it as quite torn, with a lot of internal conflicts. I couldn’t really relate to that, which was another reason why we (me and my wife) left the group. It was actually run from Denmark as a satellite group, and the problems began when someone in the group took an authoritative role, and started focusing more on rigidness and the right way of doing things instead of unity, inner harmony and health.

C: Conflicts are bound to occur when people get together, regardless of context or content. How do you think disagreements and conflict translate into the world of music and the music scene?

A: In tai chi, as with improvisation, it is important to accept things as they are and how they unfold. If you start rejecting the things that manifest, you are working against the flow. It is the same way with thoughts during meditation. If there is a thought, you don’t force it out. You notice your thoughts, welcome them, choose not to indulge in them, but also not to reject them.

When it comes down to the music scene, I think we need to specify what scene. Depending on what setting I’m playing in, I can get the hunch that some things are «allowed» while other things are not, and that there is a certain expectation from organizers and audience alike.

C: Do you make compromises in situations like that?

A: Ideally I would have liked to never make any compromises, but I can’t say for sure that I’m always playing whatever I would have played regardless of context. At the same time I find it unproblematic to read whatever situation you’re in. Yesterday I played a solo gig in small gallery outside of Trondheim. The audience was interested in abstract art, but they were not so familiar with experimental musical expressions. I realized I wanted to take some measures to counter that. One could view that as an artistic defeat, but not necessarily: It’s just a way to invite them into what I’m doing.

I have especially noticed the effect of artistically adjusting to the situation when we’ve played with my trio Parallax. We’ve played at so many different venues over the last 10 years. In some situations we allow ourselves more than in other situations.

C: But I guess you can have a range of expressions, and that you use the proper tools depending on the situation you’re in. That’s not the same as making compromises; you just have a vast selection from the pool which defines you as an artist.

A: In my opinion, the best musicians are those who are good at finding a balance between what is “accepted” and “unheard of” in a way which makes the “unheard of” accepted. The way they bring it into the music makes it work.

C: Exactly what measures did you take with the audience at yesterday’s solo gig?

A: I just talked with them before I started playing. I spoke about how I think of my music in visual terms, and also about nature sounds and how to make supernatural field recordings with rules that follow their own inner logic.

C: Now that’s a mouthful. Pleas explain!

A: I have worked a lot with with various visual artists. Generally I find it interesting, but also because it has helped med to concretize what I’ve been doing sonically. In many instances, it is easier for an audience to come into your musical world if they have a visual hook to latch on to. Of course, some people prefer to just close their eyes and make their own visual references. Either way, my impression is that you can help unexperienced listeners find their way into this type of music by giving them some guidelines. This time around, since I was playing in a gallery adorned with abstract art, I found it natural to talk about the visual aspect of what I am doing.

C: Is this also about you as something visual, or is it about drawing parallels between abstract art and abstract music?

A: Yes, the latter. I sort of give them an introduction in how I think when I create a musical story, and that this is not necessarily a purely horizontal or linear construction. It’s also about depth, about the distance between elements, and about how one can create a three dimensional space and define what lives within that space. Then — at least in my case — put these things together into an electro acoustic orchestra with its own inherit logic. Compare it to a David Lynch movie: You get sucked into this strange world and you have to interpret and figure out what’s going on based on the rules he has created. That type of weightlessness is also a goal with my music.

C: Most musicians – if not all – have a set of building blocks with which they create their music. Are you reaching out for your building blocks when you play, or are you trying to find something new?

A: For me it’s both, and both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses. It’s good to be able to produce something on the spot, something which you already now. At the same time it’s good to be adventurous and to be evaluating the music based on what is actually going on and what you are hearing.

C: You also mentioned nature sounds and field recordings. What’s that all about?

A: I was supposed to be in Iceland next week, working together with a composer named Hafdís Bjarnadóttir. She has done field recordings all over Iceland, and together we are working to make plastic soundscapes out of our respective material. We’re creating places which really don’t exist anywhere. I’m very much thinking like that also when playing solo. Surrealistic soundscapes are fascinating, like mixing a field recording of a moose together with the sounds of a tropical jungle and a cold gushing wind from Siberia; places and events that naturally don’t share the same space in our real world.

The perception of time is also an important component; an unpredictable dramaturgy. In a forest, you may know the sounds, but not when they will occur. That element of randomness is exciting. I have worked together with Christian Blom and his Al-Khowarizmis mechanical orchestra. This orchestra, which in fact is a sound installation, is programmed with random parameters, so it embodies this unpredictability. If you play with it for some time, you know what sound sources it has, but not when they will be produced or for how long. It can give you silence for 3 minutes straight. It’s a difficult partner to work with, but also a rewarding one!

C: We’ve just briefly touched on your Parallax trio. What type of trio is it?

A: The trio consists of Stian Omenås on trumpet and percussion, Ulrik Ibsen Thorsrud on drums, percussion and saw, and myself on guitar and prepared guitar. We’ve kept it going for 11 years now. The goal has been to keep a dynamic trio which is always evolving in different directions. Everyone is working with their own things outside of the trio, different projects and so on, and then everybody is free to bring whatever they find back into the group. The only filter is that you yourself feel that what you bring has a place in the trio. Whatever you bring, the others need to back up as best they can. I think this band to me was a reaction to more strict impro scenes which I’ve also been a part of. We stared working together with other musicians, artists and composers quite early. Those collaborations have been great in order to push the band in different directions.

C: Is it a working band or a project based band, in the sense that you never practice together to keep things «fresh»?

A: Then I would say it is a project based band. The exception would be when we are working together with external collaborators, which we in fact do quite a lot. Right now we will be working together with Anne Hytta on a NyMusikk-tour called Strypetak (a strypetak is a position on the violin which you get by placing the 1st finger over two strings, often with the aim of intonating a pure minor third). We’ve worked a great deal with lighting artists, neoN trio and composers like Anders Tveit, Amund Røe, Tine Surel Lange, Ernst Van Der Loo and aforementioned Hafdís Bjarnadóttir. In settings like these, especially when composers are involved, we set rehearsals.

C: You’re originally from Trondheim, but you’ve been living in Oslo for many years. Now you’re back in Trondheim again. What’s that like?

A: I’m actually not quite sure yet! We moved in January 2020 because my wife is taking a PhD there. The idea was that we were going to rent a house and stay a couple of months. But our children really thrived, and it was very convenient with regard to my wife’s research. I was fine with both, as I have to travel around either way. Because of Covid-19, we really never got into our usual everyday routine. I was supposed to travel to Oslo quite a lot in this period, 16 times in one semester, but everything was cancelled. Now we’ve got a really nice play to stay, and there’s this serenity I get up here which I guess we needed.

I love Oslo, and we’re basically doing the same thing we did when we moved there: we’ll play it by ear, and if it comes down to it, we’re ready to move back (or somewhere else). I know the scene in Oslo well, and Parallax is based there, so I feel I have a second home in Oslo either way. It’s nice to be able to build a more solid network in Trondheim as well. Maybe it has something to do with age, or maybe it is a trend, but it seems like a lot of people are moving out of Oslo. The various cultural organizations and thus cultural life are more or less centered in or around Oslo, which makes sense, but I think it is possible to build something in Trondheim as well.

C: There are a lot of wise heads and diligent hands in Oslo, but it seems like there’s a good bunch in Trondheim now also. It wouldn’t surprise me if we would witness a kind of decentralization — at least of musicians — in the next few years. I guess the more people move out from the bigger cities, the more connected everything becomes. The distances won’t seem that far, because something is happening in every little place. Still I guess people would need a reason to settle down in a small village.

A: Yes, there’s a big difference between a smaller village and Trondheim. In Trondheim we also have NTNU (the university in Trondheim, which also has a musical faculty), and through institutions you can help influence the scene. I’ve worked at NMH, and I’ve seen some strengths at that institution which I would like to bring back to NTNU. One thing is that they have been very conscious about strengthening their research program. I think a lot of interesting stuff is going on behind the scenes there, especially collaborations between artistic genres. My ambition is to get more of that here in Trondheim. I think it is important that the institutions develop, get inspired from one another and don’t stagnate. At NMH, I was working with the improvisation class for a while, and we didn’t just work with the jazz students, but also students from folk music, classical music and from conducting. My impression is that a lot of interesting projects have sprung out from that class alone, but maybe more importantly; it has a genuine effect on the students’ attitude towards improvisation.